Personal computer (PC) systems are well known in the art. PCs are widely used for providing computer power to many segments of today's modem society. PCs may be a desktop, floor standing, or portable microcomputer that includes a system unit having a central processing unit (CPU) and associated volatile and non-volatile memory, including random access memory (RAM) and basic input/output system read only memory (BIOS ROM). Further, PCs may include a system monitor, a keyboard, one or more flexible diskette drives, a CD-ROM drive, a fixed disk storage drive (also known as a “hard drive”), a pointing device such as a mouse, and an optional network interface adapter. Examples of such personal computer systems are IBM's PC 300™, ThinkCentre™, ThinkPad®, Aptiva®, and IntelliStation® series.
Within the last few years, mobile computing devices have become mobile. Examples of commonly used mobile computer devices include notebook PCs, personal digital assistants (PDAs), sophisticated wireless phones, etc. When compared to traditional PCs, however, mobile computing devices typically exchange some functionality or performance in exchange for their smaller size, portable power, and mobility.
Widespread usage of PCs, whether stationary or mobile, has rendered society's ubiquitous reliance on them, such as for telecommuting, news, stock market information, trading, banking, shopping, shipping, communication in the form of hypertext transfer protocol (http) and e-mail, as well as many other services. Many of these services take advantage of the communication abilities offered by and through connection with the Internet. Such connectivity has facilitated unprecedented amounts of collaboration and sharing of information between individuals, whether within an organizational structure or not. This collaboration has resulted in individuals having access to and sharing vast amounts of information, often in the form of electronic documents.
Capable of being read by various computer systems, electronic documents are digitized documents that contain text, graphics, photographs, etc. Electronic documents may exist in a wide variety of file formats, such as Portable Network Graphics (PNG), Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG), Graphics Interchange Format (GIF), Tag Image File Format (TIFF), Microsoft Word (DOC), etc. Other file formats capable of handling text and graphics include Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Adobe Systems Inc.'s Portable Document Format (PDF). For many purposes, electronic documents, particularly PDF documents, have supplanted printed material for the dissemination of information, as many journals, newsletters, books, articles, etc., now distribute exclusively in electronic format.
While electronic documents possess improved qualities in many ways over hardcopies, such as cost, easy of distribution, and time to prepare, disadvantages exist. One deficiency of electronic documents is that it is difficult to find the most interesting or useful part of an electronic book or other document. With paper books, individuals may observe which pages are the most worn or the pages to which the book naturally opens due to frequent reading of those pages. For example, one can easily discern which book in a library is the most useful based on its wear. Additionally, one can also often find the most useful part of the book by noting the wear caused by frequent reading. Because of their fixed nature electronic documents fail to provide such indications of frequently read or particularly useful sections of the document.
There is, therefore, a need for methods, systems and media that enable rapid access to salient parts of an electronic document, which further assists readers by minimizing their invested time in order to ascertain the useful and/or salient parts of the electronic document.